When Jeremy Scott drives his horsebox to Cheltenham next week, bearing plausible winners on two consecutive days, it will complete a remarkable change of vocation. At that fifties time of life, when many are told it is impossible to find work at all, Scott has left dairy farming behind to become one of the meteors of jump racing.

Not that he would see it quite so dramatically. Scott has a droll, self-deprecatory manner which, allied to gangling height, once served him well in the local amateur dramatic society. “I was usually the bungling henchman,” he recalled. “I played a pantomime